Creating your first dashboard

To create your first dashboard, start by opening a report that has some interesting data. On each of the charts, tiles, and other elements, you'll see a pin icon in the top right of that object. After you click on the pin, it will ask you what dashboard you wish to pin that report element to. You can, at that point, select a new dashboard to create or choose an existing dashboard to add the element to, as shown in the following screenshot. This is what makes Power BI so magical—you're able to append data from your accounting department next to data from your sales and customer service teams, giving your executives one place to look:

Once you pin the first item to the dashboard, you'll be prompted with a link to the dashboard. The newly created dashboard will allow you to resize elements and add additional tiles of information. You can click Add Tile in the upper-right corner to add additional interesting data, such as web content, images—such as logos—text data, and videos to the dashboard. Most people use this in the line-manager dashboard to insert a company logo and a small video talking about the initiative of the quarter that relates to the dashboard from the executive team.

You can also pin real-time data as a tile, as well as use custom streaming data. Once you click Custom Streaming Dataset, you have the option to add a new dataset from Azure Stream Analytics or PubNub, or a developer can use the API to push data directly in via the API. Azure Stream Analytics is the most common of these live data streams. In this mechanism, devices could stream data through Azure Event Hub, for example, and then get aggregated with Azure Stream Analytics. Imagine a smart power grid sending thousands of records a second to the cloud, and then Azure Stream Analytics aggregating this to a single record every five seconds, the status shown by a moving needle in a gauge or line graph in Power BI. 

One of the key ways to view Power BI is from a phone either in web view or in the native Power BI client, which is downloadable from the App Store for Android or iPhone. There are going to be some dashboard elements that you'll want to exclude from a phone device because the surface area is too small. By the very nature of the device, most people sign into Power BI on their phone to get a quick look at the numbers. For those consumers, you can create a specialized phone view of the dashboard.

Simply click on the Web View drop-down box in the top right and select Phone View. The default phone view will contain every element from the web view. To remove items, hover over each report element and click the push pin to move it to the Unpinned Tiles section, as shown in the following screenshot. Once you're done, you can click the phone icon (or Phone View name, based on your resolution) and flip it back to the Web View again: